My name is Amethyst Veronica Arrow, but my mom called me Ava. I was raised in a small town in America. I was born with Alexandra’s Genesis, as was my father and his mother. My black hair didn’t help hide this. I was different, most people think that’s a good thing, but I know that it isn’t. When you’re different, people judge you, make fun of you, ridicule you, when you’re different, people exclude you from things that, if you weren’t different, you would normally be included in.
My dad told me I should embrace my condition, I never wanted to. My mom told me I should go out and make friends, I was always too anxious to. My grandmother told me I should look at people’s faces more, I never did.
That ended up aiding my survival when the virus broke out. The virus was only contagious if you looked at other people’s faces. I was twenty-one when the virus became an epidemic, I was twenty-one when most of the people attending the college I went to died, and I was twenty-one when everybody in my family died.
I was sad, but I wasn’t devastated. This isn’t a love story, this isn’t an action story, this isn’t a mystery story, and this isn’t a comedy, not in my opinion anyway.
When the virus spread, I read about it online, I went even more out of my way than usual not to look at people. When people stopped dying, because the only people left were the people who avoided others, I started going back to normal.
Let me tell you, there were a lot more jobs and food available. I got an internship at Google and continued attending university. I went out more, everything’s prices went down everywhere, due to the new lack of demand, and life became easier for me and everybody else left.
Once most of the global, and local, population died, I figured out I was a dog person and bought a German Shepherd I named Po, a Golden Retriever I named Dug, and three Great Danes I named Marmaduke, Scooby-Doo, and Goofy.
I earned my master’s degree in computer engineering and became an engineer for Google. I love my job and I loved coming home to my dogs. I loved my life. Even though the world was emptier, I felt as content as a dog curled up in front of a fire in the middle of a snowstorm.
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